I have to thread the needle a bit on this one. On the one hand, I have very much evangelized how much sports video games has done to educate lots of people on some of the finer points of professional and college sports, myself included. Even though, at times, I like to poke fun about how playing games like Madden or NCAA Football probably doesn’t actually qualify someone to run an IRL football program. At the same time, we’ve also seen these same games in use to further educate fans of these games, including during broadcasts.
So, fine, these games can be useful in lots of ways to fans of these games. But they’re still subjective and imperfect facsimiles of their real life counterparts. The most famous example of this is perhaps the Madden player ratings system. Every year when the game comes out, you will inevitably see a report about how this player disagrees with his rating, or that person thinks some player attribute isn’t as accurate as it should be. And because of the subjective nature of all of this, owners of NFL teams probably shouldn’t be basing IRL team decisions on what they see in the video game.
And, yet, that is reportedly what New York Jets owner Wood Johnson did.
A new report claims that Woody Johnson, who owns the NFL team the New York Jets, has used EA’s popular Madden video game series to help him make decisions involving real players. It’s even reported that a trade deal was killed due to stats found in the game.
On December 19, The Athletic reported that during the last NFL offseason, a trade deal between the Jets and the Denver Broncos was close to being finished until owner Johnson vetoed the plan. According to multiple sources, the owner canceled the deal to pick up wide receiver Jerry Jeudy because the player had a low rating in Madden. Jeudy would be picked up by the Cleveland Browns and had a fantastic season.
That wasn’t the only time Johnson did this sort of thing. He also reportedly pushed back on his General Manager’s desire to sign John Simpson in free agency due to some low attribute ratings in the game. The Jets, in that case, did still sign Simpson, who played well for the team.
Now, on the one hand, I’m somewhat impressed that a 77-year-old knows enough about the Madden series to even use it this way. On the other hand, there are also reports that some of this knowledge is coming from Johnson’s two sons.
According to some sources who spoke to the outlet, the use of Madden in decision-making is a sign that Johnson’s teenage sons have too much influence.
“When we’re discussing things, you’ll hear Woody cite something that Brick or Jack read online that’s being weighed equally against whatever opinion someone else in the department has,” a Jets executive told The Athletic.
Now, the team denies these unemployed children have anything to do with any personnel decisions for the team. However, when you consider just how laughably bad the Jets are run as an organization, I can’t find myself putting anything past them.
There are ways to apply lessons learned from video games in real life, to be sure. But I would advise NFL owners and executives to no more base team decisions on Madden ratings than they would assume all turtles are evil because they played Super Mario Bros.
